The power of convention

I’m going to start this issue with a question. What would you say is the cost of presenting results that go against scientific convention?

Some mild professional anxiety? A few scornful looks from your colleagues perhaps? I’d wager that if those results were presented in good faith in the spirit of full scientific disclosure then none of you would expect the cost to be your career.

With the recent resignation of Professor Antonio Erediatato – the head of the Opera group based at Gran Sasso which appeared to show neutrinos generated at CERN travelling faster than the speed of light – that price seems to be the going rate.

At the time of writing this comment there is very little information to go on, what we know is this: After announcing the Opera results, physicists across the globe all turned their heads – the result challenged Einstein, and you don’t get to do that lightly. Acutely aware of the gravity of the situation Professor Erediatato announced the findings with “words of caution”. After failing to find a flaw in the results, he decided to present the results so the wider scientific community could scrutinise the work. In March of this year another experiment based at Gran Sasso reported that neutrinos do not in fact break this universal speed limit. After this finding – a confirmation in many ways of Professor Erdiatato’s own warnings about the Opera results – he resigned.

Now, not being privy to the private discussions of the upper echelons of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics or CERN I can’t tell you if Erediatato went against the wishes of the rest of the Opera experiment with his announcement, or if - as is rumoured - it was his own team that pressured him to go, but I do know his resignation sends terrible signals.

Get it wrong, and you pay the price with your job. It is a dangerous precedent in my view, and one that flies in the face of what science should be about. When he announced the results Erediatato went out of his way to suggest that they might be wrong – and essentially asked the scientific community to help find those flaws. It was an announcement of staggering honesty and is exactly what science should be. He followed his results, they lead him to an incredible conclusion and he asked that science prove him wrong. He should be applauded for integrity, not punished like a petulant child.

Given the potential impact of the results, and the team’s ties with CERN – without doubt the most visible and talked-about experiment in the world ­– it is hard not to think that politics is involved, even harder to imagine that he wasn’t pushed.